Indiegogo now lets you fund a project forever with subscription crowdfunding

Between Indiegogo and Kickstarter, Indiegogo is the less safe option. Sure, there are various harrowing stories about Kickstarter campaigns taking people’s money and either producing a shoddy product, or ultimately not producing one at all. Whereas Kickstarter doesn’t quite support product developers that cut and run, that ability is unintentionally built right into the very nature of Indiegogo.

Kickstarter projects will not take your money if they don’t meet their goal, but Indiegogo has an option where a project will take your money whether or not it reaches its goal — and the platform is known to be pretty lenient on what kind of claims it’ll allow projects to make. Now, Indiegogo is introducing forever funding — a way for patrons to continually fund a project.

Forever funding is perhaps a response to Patreon, another crowdfunding platform that allows for what is essentially subscription-based crowdfunding. Indiegogo hasn’t confirmed certain details regarding forever funding just yet — such as what cut Indiegogo itself will take — but the model helps developers deal with costs such as maintenance, should their projects require it. Video games that require servers or regular updates, like MMOs, could certainly benefit from a crowdfunded subscription.

While Indiegogo’s option to allow projects to take your money regardless of reaching a goal is not intentionally shady — it’s just sometimes used that way by project developers. The new forever funding option will likely end up that way every now and then, but ultimately, it helps give projects a more steady stream of funding.

It’s not uncommon to see Kickstarter projects run out of the money they generated before the project is completed — one of the platform’s most notable and earliest successes, Double Fine’s Broken Age, ran out of cash before the second half of the game was completed. In theory, forever funding would prevent this, allowing the team to keep their offering plate open for the length of the project. Many crowdfunded projects do this anyway — they just open donations on their own site after the crowdfunding period ends, or they even put incomplete, early access versions of the game on sale.